Exploring the Use of Teacher Third-Position Support of Multilingual and Monolingual Children

With a growing number of multilingual children entering early childhood education, teachers are challenged to create appropriate learning opportunities for all children. Given diverse literacy skills and cultural backgrounds, early childhood educators might provide different support to children after an inappropriate child response depending on the child’s language background. Therefore, the present study aimed to identify different types of teacher third-position support (i.e., support provided after not being satisfied with the child response or nonresponse) in interaction with multilingual and monolingual kindergartners. We conducted a multiple case study in which three kindergarten teachers and seven multilingual and five monolingual children were observed in the classroom during one school year. Support sequences were analyzed using content analysis. We identified six different types of teacher third-position support in educational interactions with multilingual children: allocate turn to another child, provision of hints, reduction of choice, establishing common ground, modeling, and using the home language. Teachers tended to use reduction of choice more with multilingual children, whereas provision of hints was used more with monolingual children. Overall, the presented study enabled us to obtain an in-depth view of how teachers differentially adopt types of third-position support in interaction with multilingual and monolingual kindergartners.